social movements

Conflict mineral advocates see a DIRECT link between the exploitation of minerals and the perpetuation of the conflict. In contrast, we see the mineral sector as ONE important and wealth generating part of the wider economy. At the heart of our scepticism over the focus on the mineral trade is the fact that in the absence of genuine governance and security, any part of the economy - charcoal, cattle or fuel - can be exploited by a rebel group with guns, as you point out.

To pick up on the point made about Cabot’s campaigning for conflict-free minerals, it’s not just Cabot, there are a number of Western mining companies involved in this, as pointed out by the researcher Raf Custers in this article: http://www.intal.be/nl/node/9185

There is for example also Commerce Resources from Canada, about to develop two major tantalum-exploitation sites in British Columbia and Quebec. The anti-conflict mineral lobbyists they hired have allegedly been working closely with the Enough folks.

Advocates like myself, ICG, Global Witness, IPIS, Oxfam and, yes, Enough, have long argued for comprehensive security sector reform and support to the judiciary. ICG and myself (used to be one and the same) have also pushed for a holistic approach to the FDLR that would include more flexibility by the Rwandan government and the UN (although not political negotiations).The problem is that no one ever listened to us. I can't tell you how many briefings I've had with State Dept, FCO, DFID, EU and the AU about these issues. There was not enough of a domestic lobby for them to care. Now, Americans care because there has been intensive lobbying by advocacy groups, who sometimes simplify and bend the truth to pound their message through. I don't like that one bit, and it can lead to bad policy. This legislation is not bad policy, however, if it is applied correctly. I would like to see the US go one step further and push for large support to reforming the Congolese regulatory bodies in the Kivus, much like RCS if I understand correctly, which would make due diligence feasible. Also, if coupled with investigative bodies like the one we pushed for with CIC (http://www.cic.nyu.edu/peace_ssr/congo.html) even the underground gold trade could be better regulated.

I doubt Enough does more than talk to those sources in the industry, but if you have doubts then we should emphasize that the bill was also supported by Catholic Relief Services, Amnesty International, Global Witness and Human Rights Watch.

Does this mean that the 2006 Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109-2125) sponsored by then Senator Obama and co-sponsored by Hillary Clinton was not substantive or meaningful? Are there no provisions in the 2006 law that can play a constructive role in advancing peace and stability in the region?

due diligence and sanctions for non-compliant companies could provide the necessary incentive structures for companies and the Congolese state to strengthen their regulatory agencies, clear the soldiers out of the mines and render the trade more accountable and transparent. That could then finally prompt companies to invest in industrial tin mining in the Kivus – the Bisie polygon in particular – which would in turn cut out a lot of the crooked middlemen and militias that currently benefit from the trade and who parasitize the Congolese state.

The important fact is not the size of the Congolese market to the global market. The important fact is the size of the companies affected by the legislation to the producers (exporters/processors).

On the second point, I think you missed a key component. There is a background constraint to the equations you did, which is what can be done by the US. ENOUGH worked on a policy that resonated with US constituencies AND was directly material to the US Congress AND could be implemented through US legislation. So they can’t just advocate for any policy at all, but policies that are relevant in the US. Importantly, you ignore that ENOUGH does campaign on all sorts of other issues, including support for peacekeepers. This is not absent from their campaign materials. It was absent from the legislation, because that clearly would not be material to a financial reform bill. This is also a matter of facts. We can see ENOUGH’s support for peacekeepers, and we will see that in the future. On point three, it is not a question of facts. It is clearly stated as a counterfactual. “What if Congress doesn’t pay attention to other important issues?” I’m not sure what facts one can appeal to. I also find it highly unlikely that this legislation will distract Congressional attention from other DRC issues in the future. I suspect it is much more likely that it will RAISE the profile of the DRC in foreign affairs issues for Congress as a result of extensive lobbying. The “advocacy space” is not fixed. In fact, it might be expanded by the result of lobbying. But regardless, there is no “fact” to appeal to resolve this argument. Finally, Jason is right that the legislation creates an incentive structure for responsible supply chains, which in the long run will likely be a good thing.

An unintended consequence of this legislation will be the increased cost of doing business and possible end of doing business with 9 other African countries who may transship some Congolese material but also produce their own. If economies in the 9 other African countries listed in this law are injured as a consequence and livelihoods reduced then instability and poverty are the results of this well intentioned and poorly crafted legislation. Instability and poverty that could well lead to increased civil conflict in those countries.

The industry has another, entirely different, choke point. The processors. There’s a very small number of companies that have the ability to take coltan and produce tantalum from it. No more than a handful globally. Cabot in the US, Fluminense in Brazil, Starck in Germany, a couple in China, Ulba in Kazakhstan. Perhaps a couple more.

The way to effect real change in this situation is to follow the flow of money. It is as simple as that. While I agree with Tim Worstall that the processors of tantalum are the ones who really would make the decision to stop purchasing conflict minerals, they would no longer have incentive to buy if the electronics industry didn’t keep BUYING. That is why IMHO emphasis has been put on the electronics brands. GlobalWitness recently released a report which many of you may find of interest. Here is the link: http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/1019/en/do_no_harm_a_gu

One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.

In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.

Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.

To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.

around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.

Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.

The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.

At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.

what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.

the phrase “to live well but not better” (than others, or at the cost of others) is potentially confusing in English since “well” and “better” are similar if used to denote qualitative vs quantitative meaning. Language and culture are crucial elements if we are to convince others to understand and then follow this “dictum”. For example, English is a language based largely on nouns, while Anishinabe languages are dominated by verbs, resulting in cultures which focus respectively on objects versus process[12], with a resultant tendency to objectivize or integrate nature.[13] This may in part explain the domination of the planet today by English dominated cultures and may make the task of undoing this domination extra difficult.

Ecuadorian economist Pablo Davalos[16] provides a brief survey of the evolution of dependency, Marxist, world system and neo-liberal classical economics to show how we have arrived at a state of economic autism. He concludes that “Of the alternative concepts that have been proposed, the one that presents more options within its theoretical and epistemological framework to replace the old notions of development and economic growth, is Sumak Kawsay, good living.”

The creation of “autonomous” zones of power in Chiapas, with parallel institutions of governance are said to have brought significant political transformation, but some say they have not yet created a viable model of economic autonomy for poor peasants.[22] Others cite civil – military tensions in the Juntas of Good Governance as reducing local autonomy.[23] Some feel that internal political organization has taken priority over social and economic improvements and weakened earlier efforts to reform the broader Mexican state and guarantee indigenous rights of self-determination.[24] Nevertheless, the Zapatista carcoles are models of governance which include many elements implicit in the ecosocialist and degrowth paradigms and further research on these experiences is sorely needed.

The protection and preservation of balance in the natural world, including all its living beings, is a primary goal and need of our proposal. Mother nature has inherent rights to exist on the Earth in an undiminished healthy condition.

The elementary requirement for the strengthening of these social movements are already on the ground, whether in the Bunge la Wananchi in Kenya, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa, Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace (SWVP), or Enough is Enough in Nigeria, and the anti-colonial forces in the Western Sahara.

The same colonial and slave masters who dehumanised African peoples understood that dehumanisation require an ideological component to supplement naked force.

Martin Luther King Jr reminded us that the worst thing to do is to sleep through a revolution.

We are reminded in the Pan-African struggles of numerous examples of those who espoused Pan-African ideas and yet exploited their brothers and sisters, whether in the USA, the Caribbean, South America, or Africa.

We see these class hierarchies today when (mis)leaders like Robert Mugabe and Yoweri Museveni say that African unity requires a strong middle class. This class has simply been the instrument for plunder of Africa. In Liberia, former slaves went back and considered themselves better than other Africans while speaking of African independence and unity. Today in the Sudan and many parts of Africa, the hierarchy is expressed in class, religion and gender terms. Pambazuka will have to refine its tools to deal with the coming onslaught of those who want wars between ‘Arabs’ and Africans in Africa.

Pambazuka must continue to break from the NGO orbit and continue to champion transformation of African societies.

If Pambazuka has been a catalyst in a community of activists, it is also true that the full potential is yet to be realised.